Sanity & Matrimony

Ten Arguments in Defense of Marriage (Part 2 of 2)

by Anthony Esolen

In Part 1 of this essay, published in the previous (July/August) issue of Touchstone, I
argued that, while many believe that all principled arguments against the legalization
of same-sex “marriage” (or, more accurately, pseudogamy) must stem
from religious precepts, I could present ten such arguments based solely on
common sense, history, and logic. In that essay, I enumerated the first six
of those ten objections; here, I present the other four.

Trust Undermined

7. The legalization of homosexual pseudogamy seals us in a culture of
divorce. In the United States, it is estimated that nearly half of all
marriages will end in divorce. It is hard to see how any community can survive
the resulting break-up of homes, the smashing of friendships, the jumble
and shuffle of neighborhoods, and the underlying assumption that human beings
are not to be trusted.

Social science has finally come round to showing just a bit of what we all
ought to have known anyway: Divorce is deeply damaging to the family and to
the community. Boys who grow up apart from their fathers are many times more
likely to fall prey to drugs and crime; girls are more likely to seek male
affirmation elsewhere and bear children out of wedlock. Spend a little time
getting to know the destroyed lives of a few of the millions of young men in
prison, and then try to defend divorce—or the habit in some communities
of never forming a marriage in the first place.

Prior to the age of no-fault divorce, we were told by the social reformers
that the current divorce laws were outdated and cruel, often compelling people
to manufacture ugly accusations against one another just to procure the divorce.
We were told that the reform of the laws would not increase the incidence of
divorce—since those who wanted to divorce would do so eventually in any
case. But it would save a great deal of human misery.

Yet that is exactly what the no-fault divorce laws have failed to do. Divorce
swept the land like a plague, and brought misery in its wake. And the no-fault
system is patently unjust: It often subjects the wronged party to the whim
of the guilty one; it rules out the most commonsense considerations of child
custody; and it reduces marriage to a status below that of a business contract.

If one business partner in a gas station embezzled funds and used them to
buy stock in the competition, would that partner, upon dissolution of the contract,
get to claim half of the original station? If the embezzling partner were a
woman, would she get to compel her former business partner to provide her financial
support as she bought even more of the competitor’s stock? Would not
such malfeasance land people like this in jail? Why do we take the ownership
of corporations more seriously than the establishment of families?

Any statesman must see that we cannot continue this way. At the basis of
all civilization lies trust: I must be able to believe that the people driving
down the road will stay on their own side of the yellow line. Divorce begins
by undermining trust in marriage (and that is bad enough, given our plummeting
birthrates) and ends by undermining trust altogether. We must retrace our steps;
we must bring some semblance of justice back to divorce law.

But how can we do so while legalizing homosexual pseudogamy? Again, the principle
for the legalization is that people have a right to “fulfill” themselves
sexually. But some marriages are unhappy—or some people who are married
come to think that it would be more “fulfilling” to leap the fence.
How can we deny them this? Or how can we blame them? How can we penalize the
breaker of a family, when his or her motives are those we have blessed in the
case of the homosexual?

And what about homosexual adultery? We have been informed by homosexual activists
themselves that people’s expectations in this regard will have to change.
Homosexual men do not consistently remain “faithful” to their “spouses,” in
the sense that they do not so severely restrict their sexual activity. But
if a certain looseness is granted to the male homosexual, when his jealous
lover chooses to “divorce” him, why should the same benefit not
be accorded the male heterosexual?

Homosexual pseudogamy thus threatens the already embattled institution of
marriage with a new barrage of divorces, custody litigation, and all their
attendant misery.

The bases for marriage and homosexual union are, moreover, incompatible.
The former is based upon the very structure of our bodies, upon biological
and anthropological fact. The latter is based, as is the sexual revolution,
upon the will alone. In practice, it must accelerate the destruction of marriage;
its principle, or rather the false principle that made pseudogamy conceivable
in the first place, is all the poison that is needed.

The Corruption of Friendship

8. It normalizes an abnormal behavior. That it is an abnormal behavior
is clear to any disinterested observer. It hardly needs mentioning that the
male and female bodies are made for one another, in obvious ways, and in more
subtle ways which medical science is only beginning to discover. Before the
current wave of political advocacy, many psychologists who studied homosexual
men did come to some plausible conclusions about same-sex attraction. From
their studies and from what I know about the nature of boys, I offer the following
alternative theory to explain male homosexuality.

I accept the word of male homosexuals who say that they have always felt
attracted to other males. There is no reason to doubt them on this. They believe
that this attraction makes them different from their brothers—and this
is where they go wrong. The plain fact is that all boys have a deep need (again,
this is something hard to explain to women) for male acceptance and affirmation.
All boys are attracted to the athletic, the popular, the gregarious, the cheerful,
the clever boy, or man, as the case may be.

This need is expressed in various ways: sometimes by shutting girls out of
the club; sometimes by horseplay; sometimes by the violent high spirits of
a gang; sometimes by initiation rites involving blood; sometimes by sworn devotion
to a higher cause. In every boy there is a strain of the Tom Sawyer who organizes
the other boys around him, or of the boys who look to a Tom Sawyer. The art
of every culture testifies to these powerful (and difficult) friendships: Gilgamesh,
Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Kidnapped, The Iliad, Star Wars.

From this single assumption, all else follows. For suppose the boy has a
cruel father, who makes fun of him for being slow or fat or clumsy. Or suppose
he is naturally shy, and is rejected by the local boys—as he watches
their rough games resentfully yet longingly from the kitchen window. Or suppose
the boy’s older brothers ignore him, and he watches in envy as they catch
the football or flirt with the pretty girl. Suppose a boy is rejected by the
most important males in his life. The longing for male companionship does not
go away; and remember, boyish friendship is expressed with an active and frank
physicality.

What happens now may depend on other factors: the presence of some one friend
in whom he can trust, or a loving father who will make rejection by the other
boys pale in importance. Failing that, the boy must struggle on his own to
define himself as a boy, or he must accept that he “deserves” to
be rejected by the others, because he is not a real boy. This struggle is for
the central fact of the boy’s existence—and that, too, is unwittingly
supported by homosexuals, who alone among people of all kinds of sexual habits
associate their very identities with their longings.

When the boy reaches puberty, the longing assumes a new character, influenced
by the boy’s new capacity for sexual arousal and his developing, and
often chaotic, feelings of sexual desire. The same kind of bodily fooleries
that help form the identity of other boys—for instance, nude bathing
or semi-public urination or the common shower after an athletic contest—become
for him moments of great dread, or desire, or both at once. Hence the compulsiveness
of the homosexual’s behavior: Like other compulsives, he scratches at
a wound that will not heal; he visits again and again the painful memory; he
aches to fulfill a longing whose source he can no longer rightly recognize.

Most boys grow out of this silly stage; the homosexual, who was denied the
chance to undergo it in the normal way, returns to it, as if compelled. Hence
the exhibitionism and other forms of public behavior that one might expect
in a prepubescent boy—if the boy were deeply disturbed.

What the male homosexual longs for, sexually, is what every male needs: affirmation
by other men. It is to know that you belong, you are a man, you can be relied
on in a fight, you have what it takes. If a boy is given this affirmation,
then, barring a rape or something else unspeakably bizarre, he will not become
a homosexual.

This, too, is a plain fact: It is a sufficient condition for the nonappearance
of the syndrome. If a father affirms his son physically (for the rough touch
of a good father’s love is never forgotten by the son), then the son
will identify with the father. He will know he is a boy, to follow his father
in marrying a woman and having children by her.

Thus, male homosexuality is a corruption not of the relations between men
and women, but of the relations between men and men: It is an aberrant eroticization
of male friendship. And that explains the unimaginable promiscuity. What a
man seeks in a woman is not what he seeks in a man. Husband and wife may be “friends,” but
they are also less and more than that. My wife is not an alter ego; we do not
stand side by side to conquer the world. But I find in her what I lack in myself.
She is the mysterious one who is not like me, and my love for her is quite
unlike my love for my friend, who is like me.

There is nothing casual about marriage, but friendship descends from the
summit all the way down to pleasant and passing acquaintances. If it is friendship
that male homosexuals seek, then we might predict many of their otherwise inexplicable
behaviors. Friendship is not exclusive; one can never have too many friends;
friendship is often celebrated best in boisterous groups; to live even a week
or two without the feeling that one has a friend is agonizingly lonely.

The homosexual knows better than anyone that something has gone awry with
him. Hence his own vacillation between insisting that he is normal and his
flaunting of behavior that, if performed by anyone else in any other situation,
he himself would despise. “Queer Theory”—the name speaks
volumes.

No Curb on Transgressiveness

9. In one crucial respect the social acceptance of homosexuality makes
matters worse, not better, for the homosexual himself. If my body needs
protein, it will not do to try to fool it with starches. If the male homosexual
needs a true male friendship, and affirmation as a man, he will not attain
it by adopting the pose of a woman. That stands to reason.

But there are additional reasons why the best society for a homosexual is
one that does not condone his behavior. I am not talking about cruel severity.
If people understand that some folks are unfortunately attracted to members
of their own sex, and if, while they neither seek to reveal it nor feel compelled
to punish it, they make it known by custom that they do not approve of it,
then the homosexual is provided with a merciful curb on his behavior.

That explains why homosexuals seem to plunge further into bizarre and self-destructive
behaviors precisely in those places where bigotry against them is slightest.
For homosexuals themselves admit that they delight in being “transgressive,” that
is, in crossing the boundaries of what is decent or even speakable.

It follows that the nature of the transgressing behavior will depend upon
where the society draws the line. Even if it draws the line rather close, the
homosexual will likely stay content with merely crossing that line. If, to
be specific, it is unspeakable to suggest that a man will engage in a particular
form of sexual release with another man, then the transgressor can do that,
and let there be an end of it.

But if the line is drawn farther off, or not drawn at all, then the homosexual
must go ever farther for the same thrill of transgression; he must, as we have
seen in such cities as San Francisco and Seattle, invent methods and combinations
that are too saddening to enumerate. That such things are common in the homosexual
community should be revealing; and it is a poor charity that shrugs and pretends
that all is well. AIDS is only one disease in a panoply of ailments that the
male homosexual suffers, through abuse of his body. Perhaps the reader should
pause to consider why hepatitis is so common a killer of homosexual men.

No Wise Deferral

10. It spells disaster for children. Our society has been corrupting
childhood for a long time, all under the pretense of good hygiene.

Why have we forgotten that it is crucial to our emotional and intellectual
development that sexual feelings be latent during childhood? It frees the time
for what is then more important: learning. In the first instance, the boy learns
to be a boy and then a man, so that afterwards he can marry; and the girl learns
to be a girl and then a woman. But also the boys and girls are learning about
the world around them—a world of duties and responsibilities. This social
learning is short-circuited by a forced precocity in matters of sex.

Other forms of learning are short-circuited too. The boy who at age fifteen
is not interested in girls may well be forging his way through calculus, or
learning to take cars apart and rebuild them from scratch. The girl who at
fifteen is not interested in boys may be devouring the novels of Dickens. Since—given
the many years we expect our children to be in school and then college—most
will not marry until long after puberty, why on earth would we want to hurry
the onset of the troubles? Would we of all people not want instead that our
children should not even think seriously about the opposite sex until well
into their teenage years, at the earliest?

But if homosexual “marriage” is accepted, there can be no such
wise deferral. We will be visiting a crisis of identity upon every child in
our society. That, in fact, is the intention of many homosexual activists,
whose revenge upon the children who were once cruel or indifferent to them
is to afflict other children with doubts, to make them endure the questions
that they themselves endured.

All this is done under the guise of charity for the homosexual teenager,
but true charity would refrain from plunging children into the trouble in the
first place, and would instead offer an unambiguous expectation of heterosexuality.
That would give many pubescent teens the wherewithal to shrug off the random
doubt, rather than causing it to grow into a dreadful prognosis. But given
the latency of sexual feelings during childhood, no child will be able to say,
with confidence, “I am a heterosexual”—how could the child
really even know what that means?

In the meantime, what for boys and girls is a wholly natural attraction to
members of the same sex, in the years when they are forging their identities
as boys and girls, will now be shaded with the suspicion of homosexuality—as
if the boys and girls could really know what that meant, either!

There is no gainsaying it. If homosexual “marriage” is condoned,
then of course kissing, holding hands, celebrating anniversaries, talking about
your first date, and all the rest must be condoned. If a teacher can casually
mention where he met his wife, then the homosexual teacher can casually mention
where he met his husband. Need I mention that logic compels us to travel to
the end of this mistaken road? Why should not the bisexual mention to his third-graders
where he met his wife and husband?

Not surprisingly, those who will suffer worst from the confusion will be
those who run the gravest risks in the formation of their sexual identity:
boys. How many of them will now “know,” to their dismay, that they
are homosexual, when all they are is lonely or just at the stupid dizzy age
of thirteen, when every naked body draws their attention? How many will now
avoid the very friendships they long for, in the mistaken fear that their longing
for friendship marks them out as homosexual? What guidelines can we provide
for children who are trying to establish themselves as boys and girls, when
we have effectively told them that there are no guidelines at all?

And what about children as objects of sexual desire? In the few societies
wherein homosexuality has enjoyed some measure of acceptance, it has not been
homosexual relations between adults, but homosexual relations between a man
and a boy, or, more rarely, between adolescent girls. This marked preference
for girlish-looking youths is seen in ancient Greece, afterwards adopted in
Rome; it is also to be found in the decadent years of the Ottoman Empire and
in samurai Japan.

Again, it is not a corruption of the relations between husband and wife,
but of the relation between teacher and disciple, mentor and protégé.
From Plato’s Symposium we can gather that relations between
adult men, such as Pausanias and Agathon, were considered unseemly, effeminate,
even ridiculous. Pausanias himself does not try to justify those, but he does
complain that ignorant fathers will try to protect their sons from the advances
of their lovers (the older men). Evidently not everybody in Athens was pleased
by the vice—and, evidently, Plato himself had his doubts about it, as
he casts Socrates as the great frustrator of the desires of the debauched Alcibiades.

If male homosexuality has its source in painful events in childhood, then
many male homosexuals will be attracted to boys, as they were when they were
boys and the natural attraction was frustrated or cruelly rejected. If being
homosexual were absolutely no indicator of an inclination towards viewing children
as sexual objects, then homosexuals would be only as likely as heterosexuals
to abuse children. Then 98 percent of abused children outside the home (for
we are not talking about incest) would be girls—but this is certainly
not the case. In fact, more than half of the children who are sexually abused
outside the home are boys.

A Long Road

The reader will have noticed that I have spoken mainly about male homosexuality,
and have only lightly touched upon lesbianism. Indeed, I think lesbianism is
the more dangerous of the two, involving a far more radical rejection of the
opposite sex, though it would take a long essay to delve into its etiology
and the prognosis for a society that accepts it.

I will only say again that any wise statesman must look at us and see that
we have gone badly astray; if nothing else, demographics will prove it. Crucial
to our regaining our health will be a restored love between man and woman.
That will require the rejection of the sexual libertinism we take for granted.
And that means that the very last thing we ought to do is to give that libertinism
a constitutional imprimatur. We have a long road to travel; we ought not, at
the outset, cut off our own feet.

I have until now not spoken from a religious point of view; the truths I
have cited can be seen by anyone, regardless of faith. But I wonder whether
a wise ruler would sever his culture from the religion that gave birth to it
and nurtured it to maturity, and alienate those for whom the religion is still
the polestar of human existence. For it is foolish and shortsighted to believe
that all the moral and cultural victories won by the religion will remain after
that religion has been rejected.

It is one particular victory of Christianity to have preached to the world
the dignity of all those whom the world had scorned: women, children, the poor,
the weak, and the suffering. The first written tribute of a man to the virtue
and intelligence of a woman—not to her physical beauty—was St.
Gregory of Nyssa’s account of the life of his sister, the mystic and
theologian Macrina. No higher esteem was ever paid the child than when Christ
said, “Except ye become as one of these little ones, ye shall not enter
the Kingdom of Heaven.”

We take for granted that we will keep a few of the moral precepts of Christ
even after we have marked his followers out for derision. No true statesman
would assume so. He would know that no culture that denied its roots has survived
for long. We won’t, either. •

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of The Ironies of Faith (ISI Books), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery), and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Books). He has also translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (Johns Hopkins Press) and Dante's The Divine Comedy (Random House). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

“Sanity & Matrimony” first appeared in the September/October 2010 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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